Sunday, March 29, 2009

I’ve started renting shared workspace at the Code Factory, a “collaborative co-working space” at 246 Queen street in downtown Ottawa. I’ve purchased about 40 hours of time so far. I can use meeting rooms, internet, coffee machines, lending libraries, and even some entertainment in the form of a foosball table and a Wii.

The owner, Ian Graham, calls himself a “Management Consultant and Entrepreneurial Catalyst”. He’s very enthusiastic about the startup scene in Ottawa, and definitely wants to help act an incubator and organizer of it.

It’s a neat place to hang out and meet entrepreneurs. There’s at once an informal and exciting vibe, and every time I’ve been there I’m come back amped up. Although I mostly work out of a home office it’s worth it to rent a bit of space because I like the chance to meet people, and I’m learning a lot about what’s going on in Ottawa and especially in the startup community.

It’s great to see such a place in Ottawa, which has tons of IT knowledge and has done for many decades…The Ottawa high tech scene actually has some very deep roots, due to the presence of government research and development agencies, a highly educated workforce, a strong telecommunications sector, and (more recently) some major hardware and software firms such as Nortel, Cognos, and Corel, which generated a lot of spinoffs. To prove the point, there’s a neat family tree on the wall showing the genesis of Ottawa-Gatineau startups and their sources (government, research, telecom, and so on).